It Is All Greek To Me

Dear Reader,

I wanted to write this article a long ago and relates to my observations and experiences living in the greek reality. It certainly contains my own perceptions and feelings based on my own experiences and my innate interest in 'why' people do the things they do.

Growing up in Greece I was always finding it difficult to understand how in such a country with rich natural beauty and resources can live people who often grumble, are not happy, do harm to themselves with smoking, drinking etc and often show lack of respect for their neighbour and their environment.
This reality was the only thing I knew of and I always had objections with and only when I experienced another reality, that of England I saw that things could be different. To clarify that by the term 'reality' I mean the creation, structure, organisation and operation of a society and its prevalent mentality. 

Every constructed reality, a society consisting of some people who gathered to compose a whole base of certain rules, has its qualities, strengths and lessons to improve. England has its own and Greece has others, just like two children in one class, in a school we call Earth.

In England I learned that people can advance professionally based on their value, knowledge and skills rather than on who they know, I learned that people from all over the world with any differences such as religion, skin colour, sexuality etc. can coexist peacefully and respect one another, I learned that there can be dialogue between people and that the truth never belongs to one but there are many truths, I learned that the assumption of 'I can't' hides in it either the 'I don't want to' or the 'I don't know how'  and I've learned that if you don't try, you'll never know the outcome.
Certainly the list of the things I learned is much bigger and consists of soft and hard lessons.

Returning to Greece I knew I was leaving behind this reality and some of those rules that I would so miss because they put my life in order. Also, I knew that all these lessons would go through tests on whether or not they were assimilated, sort of like a a surprise test in the classroom I mentioned above.
So I had to confront and manage a self in an internal Greece, as I remembered Greece to be and one self as I am now in an external Greece that exists now. 
I am interested in focusing on the micro-cosmic space of man and not on discussing complex social phenomena.

It is with great interest that I often try to decode or give an adequate answer to the question on how the modern greek man chooses to live like this and manage his country in this way. Clearly the reasons are many but I ended up with one that I think is among the main and it is that of trust.

If we think for a moment on the dynamic of a (forgive me but I refer to the norm, not the mediocre) Greek family then we find that a child does not learn to trust himself, his neighbour, the society. Since one's parents provide everything, and on the other hand, society is manipulated for the benefit of the child, then the child learns to create external egocentric bases wherever he can.
Behaviours such as parking on disabled ramps, driving without a helmet, appointing and priority of acquaintances, overriding waiting queues, tax evasion, etc. indicate that the person has not learned to stand within his own boundaries, in his responsibility towards himself and towards the other, to respect the concept of law and society.

In a society where its citizens do not follow the laws made to survive and live together that have been created by those who they have elected, it is a society of teenagers who does not know where to go and what it wants, it is blindly angry with the other as a cause of its misery, does not see a bigger picture and is ultimately not stable in its development.
As long as the mirror remains covered and becoming an adult is a work only for others, then we will continue to live in a jungle where one will throw their banana peels to the other and wait for someone else to pick them up.

With Love,
Panos